Monday, July 17, 2017

Why we cannot return to our Western heritage

Occasionally, I will hear or read a call for the US to return to the
Western values upon which it was founded, values that generally include democratic
governance, human dignity, civil rights, etc.

While I affirm many Western values rooted in Judaism, Christianity,
Greece, and Rome, I find the calls to return to those values biased, narrow
minded, and historically inaccurate. I live in Hawaii, a state comprised of an
Asian majority that exceeds 77%. These patriotic Americans cannot return to
Western values that were never part of their heritage.

Similarly, in US communities in which a majority of the citizens share
an African heritage, those people cannot return to Western values that were
never part of their heritage. Indeed, the vast majority of the first ancestors
of today’s African Americans to live in North America arrived involuntarily as
slaves.

Genuine inclusivity calls for the US to incorporate the best of its
global heritage, including the values of Native Americans, African Americans,
Asian Americans, and European Americans. Most fundamentally, all of these traditions
affirm the dignity and worth of all humans. More broadly, all of their major
religious traditions point towards establishing communities that protect the
well-being of all, care for creation, and aim to help their practitioner live
meaningful lives.

Furthermore, calls for a return to Western values are often code language
for insisting upon establishing Christianity as the one true religion. Such
calls explicitly devalue other religions and are historically inaccurate. Late eighteenth-century
commentators on the founding of the United States often worried that its lack
of an established religion would doom the democratic experiment to failure.
Many of the persons prominent in founding the US were theists, not Christians.
The US at that time was home not only to a wide assortment of Christian groups,
many of whom denied that all other alleged Christians were not true Christians,
but also to Jews, Muslims, adherents of Native American religions, adherents of
African religions, and a few atheists. Declaring that the US was founded upon Christian
principles and beliefs is “false news.”

Genuine multiculturalism enriches rather than impoverishes our ideas,
our communities, our governance, and our prospects for justice, peace, and
living abundantly. Conversely, the US cannot return to its exclusively Western heritage
because that never existed.